Listen to my wpradio.co.uk podcast with Dawn Butler MP in her Brent constituency on a tour with local councillors of local playgrounds. Click on the picture below to listen to Dawn. Dawn is a very special local MP, and is vice-chair for youth for the Labour Party. She has £1 million to spend on new play facilities from government funds, and like other local MPs under the same development “playbuilder” scheme is talking to people about what to do where. This is real politics, with real people’s lives, not Westminster village stuff. Do listen. Update, thanks to Geoff’s invention you can now click on the picture and listen. Cool or what.

A moving experience in the Commons today for me when I interviewed the Conservative MP John Bercow for Women’s Parliamentary Radio www.wpradio.co.uk He’d just come back from talking in the Darfu debate, and chairs a parliamentary group on genocide internationally. He spoke movingly about why he believes in women’s rights here and globally and spoke with tears in his eyes when he talked of seeing women and children in refuge camps in Darfu on a visit as a member of the International Affairs Select Committee. Just the memory of playing football with children in these camps – with a makeshift football of old rags – had this seasoned parliamentarian and father of two young children holding back the tears as he spoke. I’ll let you know when its up there to listen to, but for a political reporter in new media, this was moving for me too. Bercow is cool!